Stupid error on a friday :)

Today I upgraded a virtual machine running NAV2015 from Update 5 to Update 6. Not a big deal, but during the process I managed to delete the CustomSettings.config file – Stupid mistake on my part.

This file holds the entire configuration for the NAV Service Tier, from authentication of client to SQL Server connection and more.

But the real question I’m left with is:

Why does NAV keep its setting files under C:\Program Files ?

With the introduction of Longhorn (Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008) and UAC – Writing inside c:\Program Files became a elevated operation, so only users with Administrator rights could write there. After that, most programs began to use c:\ProgramData or storing setup and data under c:\Users. There is even a blog from Microsoft on the subject.

Funny enough, SQL Server still defaults its location for DATA under c:\Program files unless changed during the install. They properly keept it there for historic reasons – It has been that way since SQL Server 6.5.

But NAV does not have that history restriction, so from my perspective, this can be added to Luc’s Lets clean up NAV list.